My B-Day

Last Saturday was my birthday. I can no longer deny that I'm in my 30's as I've now reached the ripe old age of 31. So you may ask yourself, how did I mark this momentous occasion? Why I went out on the Tokyo town in style of course. Well, maybe not a ridiculous amount of style, but enough to get me through the evening. First I went to a funky yakiniku restaurant for dinner (like Korean BBQ, but Japanese style) where I tried duck for the first time. Good and tasty. The grill at this restaurant is actually a flat stone (or what looked like one), and the guy puts the meat on for you and cleans it periodically and whatnot. Special thanks to Emi for arranging this place and the cake and ice-cream that made a perfect desert.

Since I'm always still up for a good booty-shakin, even at my advanced stage in life, the after-dinner festivities included hitting a Tokyo club, called a-life. Gotta say that its my first time being in a club that offers free hair styling to the ladies. They have a full hair and aesthetic salon inside the club. Music was pretty good, and I was surprised to see that so many people seemed to be really into the music, although sometimes large groups seemed to bust out the para para moves, which was a little bit scary.

We managed to stick it out until about 4am when exhaustion got the better of us and we retired to the benches in front of Roppongi Hills to wait for the first train home, followed by a day of rest, recovery and ramen.

Just another Manic Thursday

Well I figure that its been long enough since my last post that I should pop a little something something up on the old weeb here. I don't really have much to say, but as everyone knows that never stopped any blogger worth his or her salt from inundating the world with their pedantic ramblings. Who am I to break with tradition.

Tokyo's hot. Very hot. Hotter than a steamy night of lurid fornication with the entire Japanese women's gymnastics team. Only difference is that Tokyo's heat exists outside of my imagination. Apparently rainy season is supposed to have started, but I've heard on the news that no one's seen hide nor hair of this alleged rain, and even fewer people know when it will arrive.

Speaking of news, this weeks highlights include: an exploding onsen, and on an slightly lighter note, it seems that Hokkaido meat packing company, Meat Hope is in trouble for selling pork croquettes labeled as beef croquettes. Looks like Nippon Ham might be in a position to pick up some market share.

Like I said, not much to say. I'll try to snag some Akihabara pics for next time.

Pivo

So I've finally got around to using the old Google Video to get out this post that I started writing in March... So, after 2 months in the making, I would to introduce you to.. PIVO.

I ran across this display of Nissan cars the other day (on the 4th floor of a mall), and they were showing off some of their more environmentally friendly cars. They also had on display their latest concept car, the Pivo (Pee-vo). Gotta say, its a funky little beast. The doors slide open automatically, there's no back seat, but it still seats 3 people, and the main feature, well, a video's worth a thousand words..



The model driving it was pretty nice too. Friendly I mean. :)

Extra Life

With visions of little green and white mushrooms floating around in my head, I applied for a teaching position at OneUp English school a few weeks ago. My first day was this week. So far, its been pretty good. It's one-to-one teaching, and no kids, so its not as crazy and trying to control a room full of 8 year olds.
From what I've been able to gather so far, my co-workers are a colourful cast of characters, which keeps the work interesting. The students are pretty varied as well, so that seems like it will keep things pretty fresh too.
Taking the train home at 10:00 at night 3 days a week isn't exactly my idea of fun, especially when that train in in Tokyo, where dreams of a seat are seldom realized, but all in all, so far, so good.

I just need to keep my eyes open for Bowser.

Groovin'

One of the things that might not be immediately obvious when you first arrive in Japan is the fact that many streets and outdoor shopping arcades have "Muzak" playing most of the time. I don't know if they've newly installed speakers, or if they just weren't turned on previously, but I noticed that they were playing music on my way in to school today. I got to bop along to the musical stylings of Little Richard and Fats Domino on my way in.

Red beans and ... fries?!?

I stopped off at my semi-local Wendy`s today, in the mood for a treat from the motherland (Actually I went there cause you can get a variety of burgers for about $1 CAN) and I noticed a rather inconspicous sign on the table, advertising an seemingly innocent looking "hamburger". The text on the sign read something as follows: "Instead of meat, we`ve added delicious sweet red bean paste". Once I was done with all of the dry heaving and fainting spells, I came to realize that Japan truly is the land where East meets West.

Day at the office

I seem to be quickly settling in to this whole Research Student thing; I've got my own desk, and my own computer and everything. Since this is an engineering environment, my professor asked me to install Linux on my PC. A simple enough task given a few simple prerequisites; one of which is an installation CD. Everyone that I asked for a CD from responded with, "Which Linux are you looking for?". Apparently there are now 7 million distributions, and our lab used about 3.8 million of those. I still haven't installed any but that's due to other issues.
I instead spent most of the afternoon trying to review some of the umpteen thousand things that I've forgotten since I left school. Today was linear algebra, a subject I did pretty well in back in the day, but between eigenfunctions and linear mappings, characteristic equations and rank-nullity theory, I was a little overwhelmed. Let's see what fun tomorrow brings. :)